Historic black school in Virginia vandalized with racist messages

When the Ashburn Colored School opened in 1892, the single-room schoolhouse offered black children in northern Virginia a rare opportunity to receive an education, offering classes during the height of segregation for more than six decades.

For the past two years, local students had tirelessly worked to convert the aging wooden structure into a museum.

Over the weekend, the shuttered schoolhouse, a longstanding remainder of institutionalized discrimination outside Washington D.C., was defaced by vandals who spray-painted swastikas, drawings of genitals and other derogatory messages on its walls.